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I blame all the complainers complaining about complainers! Or something.

Posted by Jtpsops on 6/16/2016 3:04:00 PM (view original):
Kind of an aside, but just out of curiousity - if you have a low scouting budget, are all projections always off on the high side? Or could you see a guy that projects at 60 overall who turns out to be an 80 overall guy once drafted? If it's always the former, that's kind of lame - even with horrible scouting you should still be able to find the "blind squirrel's nut" on occasion.

Does anyone have any insight on this? I'm curious if those with bad scouting can still get lucky with prospects.

I guess it depends on what you're really asking. First, I don't know what you call "low scouting budget". Second, I've never drafted a 40 who became a 50 unexpectedly. However, individual ratings are not always high. I've drafted/signed guys with projected splits of say 38/66 and the actuals were 42/47 or something along that line.

I'm asking if a poor scouting budget (whatever you consider that number to be) will always show skewed projections on the high side (e.g. project a prospect at 80 overall who turns out to be a 60 overall), or if projections will occasionally be skewed to the low side, meaning a player will be significantly better than his draft projections.

Then your question has been answered.

I am glad they are trying something, because the attempted fix was a classic illustration of the "rule of unintended consequences." As they tried to bring more "realism" and importance to scouting and the draft, they actually did exactly the opposite. Sounds like the fixes will not really fix that situation either. I'm not calling it an issue, because it's clearly a design element. As I see it, and this is just one person's opinion, so take it for what it's worth.
Realism - why? We are already in a completely unrealistic simulated game to start with. The budget is a BIG deal. Every single owner has exactly the same amount of money with which to work, and it never changes one way or the other, and it doesn't matter at all how an owner's team performs - the budget stays the same. This simple fact of limited cash resources means the dollars must be allocated where you can get the best possible return.
So, let's just assume for a moment we allocate $10 million each to HS, college and INT scouting and another $20 million to the prospect budget. That's $50 million of $185 million - 27%. Let's also assume you want these prospects to develop so you spend another $12 million on coaches and $18 million on training and medical (this is all hypothetical - not recommended). That's another cool $50 million. Now we've allocated $100 million of our precious $185 on development items (now - the training, medical and coaching budgets - to an extent - will benefit the ML team, too. More on that in a moment.) With this approach, you really MUST have some degree of confidence in your draft and INT FA., because for the 30 players added to your Rookie roster, you are essentially investing $3.33 million per player. If you deduct out the coaching and medical - you are STILL paying - $2.27 million per Rookie roster spot.
Or - you can try a different approach . . . .
Spend $0 dollars on HS, COL and INT scouting. Drop coaching to only hire high end coaches at the ML level ($9 million). Spend $20 on training and medical. $20 on ADV scouting. Now what do you have? $116 in player payroll. Now you can own the FA market, fill your ML roster every season with the best available FA to plug open slots and let other teams develop your talent for you. It's a MUCH more predictable way to capture talent.
Bottom line for me anyway is that the draft is such a massive crap shoot, I simply am done wasting a limited resource even trying to find players there. I am steadily backing down my scouting budgets as fast as possible (within limitations of some private league rules).
One MASSIVE flaw in the entire scouting changes is the inability to see current rankings. If we could see current rankings, the whole HDB "realism" argument might be more logical. But - seriously - scouts in RL base 100% of their projections on CURRENT abilities. To not see the current rankings is really silly and runs entirely counter to the "realism" argument and actually shoots the whole thing down. At least that's my perspective.

To address your last point - the GM (you in this case) trusts his scouting department to do their due diligence. Just because you don't see a prospect's current ratings, doesn't mean your fictional scouts don't. The quality of your scouts then determines what projections they draw from that.

In real life, a GM probably wouldn't know too much about each prospect's current abilities. That's what the scouting department is for. They then make their report, with projections, based on what they've seen. If it's a good scouting department, those projections will be close. If it's a crappy scouting department, you'll blow the draft (as does happen at times in real life), and the scouts will be out of a job shortly after.

Two owners (me and him) look at the money management side of this game and both realize it's all about the budget.

One of them (him) says that to him, that means he - and each other owner - should have to be able to maximize his return, dollar-for-dollar, on all budget categories.

The other (me) says that to him, that means that owners should choose their style of play and load up where they want maximum return. Commit to an approach, pick your poison, however you want to say it. The fact that each owner has the opportunity to do something different than the next guy, zig where the others zag, naturally filters the talent throughout the pool.

Perspective, eh.

Another perspective, he says fixing the draft was a matter of the "rule of unintended consequences". Again, I see that the exact opposite way. To me, the ORIGINAL method of drafting had "unintended consequences." They should NEVER have let us see Currents.

Perspective, eh.

I'm sure, if current or projected, were letters instead of hard numbers, NONE of this would be a problem.

F 0-20
E 21-33
D 34-50
C 51-74
B 75-86
A 87-100

And that would be FAR more realistic.

That's pretty close to real life. RL scouts use a scale of 20 to 80 with an occasional split-the-difference 5 thrown in for the second digit. A scout who said Prospect A's hit tool is 66 and Prospect B's is 64 would be laughed out of the room. They're trying to project future MLB performance based on a handful of times seeing an 18-year-old bat against the coach's kid from the next town over or a 20-year-old who might have left an all-night frat party 4 hours before the game, or is facing a #5 SP from Podunk U who won't tell the coach his arm is killing him for fear of losing his scholarship. In a given draft there are 0 to 3-4 prospects whom scouts' consensus says will likely be ML stars. Everyone else is an educated guess. As set up in HBD, Currents are defined as being 100% accurate. The notion that RL scouts can accurately and precisely quantify a player's current skill (quantifiable running speed and pitch velocity excepted) is nonsense.

Suggested years ago. A-F, 1-6 or 1-8. Just to "muddy" up the ratings a little and make "sure things" less sure. And it would work to increase trading. I'm looking at a 1 power who has been hitting 38 homers in Burlington and another 1 in Burlington hitting 33. So, rather than seeing 98 and 92, I see 1. So using stats would become more important than simply looking at a rating.

But nobody listens to me.

I've been more than happy with the past couple drafts with $18-20M budgets. In numerous drafts I've gotten top 10 talent (near as I can tell) after pick 30 (full disclosure, I'm running 20/20 on a few rebuilds). I don't know if those unhappy with the current system are either a) bad at interpreting their scouts, b) have low budgets and want the best players regardless, or c) both.

d) sure things for their picks and fuzzy for everyone else, or e) sure things when they have a top-5 pick and fuzzy when they don't.

I usually run 20/0 HS/Col. If the upcoming change drives more people to College, all the better.

Exactly josh. It's still a little early to tell but it seems like $20M will currently get you in the +/-10 points or less range for fuziness. It shouldn't get any less fuzzy than that.

Pay the $20M in scouting. Then sit down with your draft pool and figure out why you probably shouldn't take that 90 OVR LF (listed by the AI as a 2B) with 100 DUR and 60-70 across the board hitting ratings with the #4 pick.